My Generation (17 page)

This vanishing act did indeed baffle me, so much so that any awareness of Negroes was honed to an exquisite receptivity not by their presence so much as by their absence. I was still quite young when I began to wonder at this absence. Why weren't they in school with me? Why didn't they belong
to the Presbyterian church, like I did? Why weren't they in the movie theaters, at the baseball games? Why were Florence, the cook, whom I was so fond of, and old William, who mowed the lawn and told me funny stories, finally such strangers, disappearing at night into a world of utter mystery? Because they were absent, even though constantly visible and present, Negroes exacted a powerful and curiously exotic hold on my boyhood; their lives, their peculiarity, their difference, their frustrating untouchability all fascinated me, and finally comprised a kind of obsession. I wasn't dumb: I knew that they had lives beyond the sweat of hard ill-paid labor and Saturday night mayhem and being whores, and I struggled in my way to get to know them. For one thing, I knew they led—many of them at least—a religious life, a life of incandescent faith. The presence in the city of two messianic figures, Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux and his archrival Bishop Grace—known as Daddy Grace—was testimony to that, and their competitive mass baptisms in Hampton Roads, thousands of the faithful being immersed in the briny waters while shouting songs of salvation, were spectacles I was drawn to, agitated and wide-eyed. I had a deep hunger to divine the nature of this spirituality, so alien to my pallid Presbyterianism, with its numbing Sunday school sessions and querulous hymns, its purple sabbath melancholy. There was a wild and forthright gladness in the religion of black people. Its music—the gospel sound and those spirituals, that gave voice to such depths of anguish and highs of almost manic ecstasy—moved me to inexpressible feelings, feelings I'd never had before and wouldn't experience again until, on a different but equally genuine level of response, I began to listen to Mozart and Bach.

Somehow I must have been aware that the key to my preoccupation with Negroes and their religion was slavery. Even so, I couldn't quite shake off the ambivalence toward them that was a product of my upbringing. Bigotry, foolish and fangless but real nonetheless, was essentially a part of my character, as it was for nearly all my contemporaries, and what little understanding I had of Negro history must have been colored by the prevailing platitudes. But at least I was groping for enlightenment. One of my first attempts at literary composition was a high-school theme called “Drusilla and Lucinda, Two Little Slave Girls.” I recall almost nothing about this work. I'm sure it was as mawkish and absurd as the official state history texts which the Commonwealth of Virginia had prepared for its youngest citizens and whose rubrics concerning the transcendental sweetness of slave times I
innocently accepted. (Consider the historical objectivity of the set of two volumes, one of which, for freshmen, had portrayed on its cover Robert E. Lee, while the other, for sophomores, has a photograph of Lee's horse Traveller, fixed in taxidermy's timeless paralysis and on display at Washington and Lee.) I've often wondered how such prejudice and propaganda didn't desensitize me to the much closer approximations of truth I found in history books when I was later contemplating my own work on slavery.

I have not overlooked the fact that the suffering my grandmother endured as a child was the grim though perhaps not unnatural consequence of a war that was fought over the very existence of slavery. Within certain sound moral standards she may be regarded as having been the pitiable victim of a struggle in which right prevailed. This idea hadn't really penetrated my consciousness either, as a boy. I recall how in 1937, the year before she died, I looked forward to our trips down to Little Washington. She was now nearly eighty-seven years old and partially paralyzed from a stroke, but her mind was still quick; she was a tiny little lady, so frail and light that my father carried her in his arms like a child. For me the pleasure and the excitement of the trip began when our car—a 1930 Oldsmobile my father won in a raffle—left the sooty urban bloat of Newport News behind, and we passed over the James River bridge into southside Virginia. A short distance beyond the end of the bridge began the fields of peanuts and cotton; they were doubtless the northernmost cotton fields in America and were symbolic to me of the forlornly beautiful, funky rural South into which we were penetrating, the South of pine forests and unpainted farm shacks, Bull Durham signs and coffee-brown sluggish streams winding through swamps, mule teams off in the distance and shabby little Negro churches in a stand of ancient oak trees, rattletrap Fords and tumbledown graveyards and a sense of universal poorness and sadness—the eternal Southern countryside. In Washington, my grandmother, bedridden now, always greeted us with the look of startled then expanding joy of one who had waited a long and anxious time for our visit.

After the Civil War she had lived a good, satisfying, philoprogenitive (she'd had eight children) life, though one beset by many knocks and adversities. When she married my grandfather, some years after his dashing career as a boy courier, he was ambitious for good old American success and in due course built up a thriving little business manufacturing chewing tobacco and snuff. Good old American catastrophe struck one year in the
1880s, however, when those original Southern robber barons, the rapacious Dukes,
père et fils
, founders of the American Tobacco Company—my father always called them “those piratical devils” and was sorely injured when I became a student at the university bearing their name—ran my grandfather out of business through some wicked monopolistic maneuver, one which, though perfectly legal in those freebooting days, left the family nearly destitute. My grandfather somehow recovered and made a moderately decent living thereafter as the proprietor and captain of a small steamship first used for hauling farm cargo to Norfolk and later taking passenger tours through Pamlico Sound. But my grandmother had had to live a domestic life of considerable hardship and, now widowed for many years, she could not quite throw off that burden of hardship, which showed in her tired eyes and brittle-looking work-worn hands, though her spirits were unquelled and chipper.

On one of those visits my mother came along, and I recall how her presence complicated matters, for she was a Northerner, born in western Pennsylvania. It was not until that trip, perhaps because I was getting a little older and more perceptive, that I realized the strained relations that must have always existed between the two women. My grandmother was a lady of bountiful nature and kindness, and it is difficult to believe that she was intentionally rude to my mother, who herself was amiable and outgoing and possessed a desire to please and who, I'm sure, made a strenuous effort to reach out to my grandmother, as if to say, I am of a different generation. The war is long over, let us bind up the old wounds. But try as she might to avoid it, and I'm sure she had tried, the remoteness my grandmother displayed, the chilliness, the hostility she felt not toward my mother herself but toward her Northernness, had in some way made itself all too evident; on the trip back to Virginia I heard my mother say to my father in a hurt, strained voice: “She has never really liked me, has she?” And despite my father's pained explanations, his denials, I think it may have been
then
that I understood how truly lacerating to my grandmother's spirit the war had been and how unexceptional it was that she could not eradicate from memory that appalling visitation with its rampaging footfalls and deafening yells of the Ohio marauders who destroyed in a day nearly all that she knew existed. How perfectly normal and human it had been to hoard up the injustice of those weeks when her belly shriveled into a knot, and when, soon after, she saw the only community she had known burned to cinders. A few others might
have had the magnanimity to forget and pardon, but my grandmother apparently did not; it was a failing I always found easy to disregard.

She once told me in those last days, squeezing my hands, “Billy, always remember you're a Southerner.” She would have greatly disapproved, I fear, the choice I made to live in the North. But if I had been able, in recent years, to reach her through the void, I may have had to tell her some truths she would have found disappointing. I would have to tell her that the North is not so bad a place to make a home, certainly in the bucolic region in which I dwell, where the people are at least as good-natured and as easygoing as Southerners, just as often displaying the generosity Southerners are famous for, and where the gently rolling landscape has the harmonious contours of the uplands of north Georgia or Alabama. I would tell her that it is much too cold in the winter where I live, and that the bland native cuisine is such that I long for the sumptuous Tidewater meals I remember; but one can fly away for the winter, and as for the cuisine—you can import almost anything edible from the South now, overnight mail, and gorge on Florida oysters and Carolina quail at home. I would tell her that our back roads have noisy rednecks and the ether teems with country music.

Sometimes I miss the South, but often I don't, since, when I view the region from afar, or when I make my frequent visits, it seems to resemble the North at its most shopping mall–ridden and architecturally berserk. Walker Percy, a writer for whom my esteem is unsurpassed, once spoke in an interview of the Connecticutization of the South, or parts of it, but this seemed to me an unnecessary disparagement of my adopted state, for if anyone shrinks, as I do, from the high-tech and runaway urban glut of Georgia's capital city, the idea of the Atlantaization of the modestly proportioned cities of Connecticut creates dread. It would seem to me that the dynamism of American society in the past few decades has allowed the development of a homogeneity in which it is very hard to regard either the ills or the excellences of life as being the peculiar property of one region or another. Such are the excellences I've seen in the South recently—side by side with certain atrocities, to be sure—that I could live there with the greatest happiness, were my transplantation to the North not so long-lived and complete.

Essentially my grandmother was right, and I have heeded her counsel: I've never forgotten that I am a Southerner. A mere decade from now her descendants will celebrate her 150th anniversary—a span of time of such magnitude that I am touched with awe that I was once so intimately bound
up with her being. To remember her now as she was, fading and frail, in the realization that those hands I embraced—the skin like tissue, the flesh warm with life yet invaded by a dying chill—were hands that once braided the hair of a little black girl who was her property, were hands that scratched for food in the harsh Carolina earth in a war that separated her and the little black girl forever: the remembrance of those hands is alone enough for me to forge a lasting bond with our unfathomable past, and to prevent me from being anything but a Southerner, wherever I live.

[
Sewanee Review
, Fall 1989.]

T
wenty-five years ago this November, I found myself in Ohio, where I was being awarded an honorary degree at Wilberforce University. The university, one of the few all-Negro institutions in the North, was named after William Wilberforce, the great British abolitionist of slavery, and so I marked the special appropriateness of this honor when I accepted the invitation a few weeks earlier. My novel
The Confessions of Nat Turner
, based on the Virginia slave revolt of 1831, had been published early in October to generally glowing reviews, had received a vast amount of publicity, and had quickly ascended to the top of the best-seller lists, where it would remain for many weeks. Only the most disingenuous of writers would, I think, fail to confess being pleased by such a reception.

I was also gratified to have the blessing of both the Book-of-the-Month Club and the
New York Review of Books
. There was a lavish movie contract from Twentieth Century–Fox and an admiring review in
The New Republic
from one of America's preeminent historians.
¹
I am stressing these outward signs of success only to point up the reversal of fortune the book would soon undergo. Like any writer who is honest with himself, I knew that
Nat Turner
had defects and vulnerabilities—Faulkner remarked that we novelists will be remembered for “the splendor of our failures”—but that it was hard not to feel a certain fulfillment that fall, more than five years after having sat down at my desk on Martha's Vineyard, determined to re-create, out of an
extremely sketchy and mysterious historical record, the life of a man who led the only significant slave revolt in our history, and to try to fashion in the process an imagined microcosm of the baleful institution whose legacy has persisted in this century and become the nation's central obsession. In 1962, when I began writing the book, the civil rights movement still had the quality of conciliation; Martin Luther King, Jr.'s grand and impossible dream was dreamed in a spirit of amity, concord, and the hope of a mutual understanding. The following years demonstrated the harsher truths: Birmingham, the bombings, Selma, the death of Medgar Evers, the three youthful martyrs of that Mississippi summer, churches set on fire, unbounded terror. James Baldwin, who was a friend of mine and who had made notes for his great essay
The Fire Next Time
while living in my house, had seen his prophecy come to pass in the smoke and flames of Watts and of Newark and Detroit. I've often been surprised, reflecting on this time, at the naïveté or perhaps blindness that prevented my perceiving in that tumult a suggestion of the backlash that awaited
Nat Turner
.

But on the campus of Wilberforce University there was no hint of the gathering storm. The angry word had not yet gone out. In a sea of smiling black and brown people, I was greeted with good will, thanks, praise. During lunch the university's president publicly expressed his appreciation for my story, for the way I had illuminated some of slavery's darker corners. At the convocation ceremony I made a brief talk in which I expressed the hope that an increased awareness of the history of the Negro (I used this word, which, though moribund and about to be replaced within months by black, was still acceptable), especially of Negro slavery, would allow people of both races to come to terms with the often inexplicable turmoil of the present.

There was much applause. George Shirley, a Wilberforce alumnus who was a leading tenor with the Metropolitan Opera, gave a spine-chilling rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in which the audience joined together, singing with great emotion. Standing in that auditorium, I was moved by a feeling of oneness with these people. I felt gratitude at their acceptance of me and, somehow more important, at my acceptance of them, as if my literary labors and my plunge into history had helped dissolve many of my preconceptions about race that had been my birthright as a Southerner and allowed me to better understand the forces that had shaped our common destiny. For me it was a moment of intense warmth and brotherhood. It would have been inconceivable to me that within a short time I
would experience almost total alienation from black people, be stung by their rage, and finally be cast as an archenemy of the race, having unwittingly created one of the first politically incorrect texts of our time.

The story of Nat Turner had been long gestating in my mind, ever since I was a boy, in fact, since before I actually knew I wanted to be a writer. I could scarcely remember a time when I was not haunted by the idea of slavery or was not profoundly conscious of the strange bifurcated world of whiteness and blackness in which I was born and reared. In the Virginia Tidewater region of my beginnings, heavily populated by blacks, society remained firmly in the grip of the Jim Crow laws and their ordinance of a separate and thoroughly unequal way of life. The evidence was blatant and embarrassing even to some white children, like myself, who were presumably brought up to be indifferent to such inequities as the ramshackle black school that stood on the route we traveled to our own up-to-date and well-equipped edifice, with its swank state-of-the-art public-address system, very advanced for the late 1930s. Many black schools in Virginia at that time had outside privies.

Despite our own fine local facilities, Virginia—in the era of the hidebound Harry Byrd political machine—ranked in public education among the lowest of the states, down there with Arkansas and Mississippi, and the quality of instruction in the black schools had to be even worse than what we white students were given, which (except for a few individually outstanding teachers) was desperately mediocre. I was painfully sensitive to this disparity, just as I was conscious of the utter strangeness of this whole segregated world: the water fountains and restrooms marked “White” and “Colored,” the buses in which black folk were required to sit in the rear, the theaters with blacks seated in the balconies (in the larger towns there were actually separate theaters); even the ferryboats crossing the rivers and bays enforced a nautical apartheid, with whites starboard and Negroes portside. I was perpetually bemused by this division and the ensuing isolation.

It was a system both ludicrous and dreadful, and I sensed its wrongness early, probably because of my parents, who, while hardly radical, were enlightened in racial matters, but also out of some innate sense of moral indignation. Although of course I was an outsider, I fell under the spell of negritude, fascinated by black people and their folkways, their labor and religion, and especially their music, their raunchy blues and ragtime and their spirituals that reached for, and often attained, the sublime. Like some
young boys who are troubled by their “unnatural” sexual longings, I felt a similar anxiety about my secret passion for blackness; in my closet I was fearful lest any of my conventionally racist young friends discover that I was an unabashed enthusiast of the despised Negro. I don't claim a special innocence. Most white people were, and are, racist to some degree, but at least my racism was not conventional; I wanted to confront and understand blackness.

Then there was the incomparable example of my grandmother. In a direct linkage I still sometimes find remarkable, I am able to say that I remain separated from slavery by only two generations and that I was related to and was familiar with and spoke to someone who owned slaves. Born in 1851 on an eastern North Carolina plantation, my father's mother was the proprietress of two slave girls who were her age, twelve or thereabouts, at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. Many years later, when she was an old lady in her eighties and I was eleven or twelve, she told me at great length of her love for these children and of the horror and loss she felt when that same year, 1862, Union forces from an Ohio regiment under General Burnside swept down on the plantation, stripped the place bare, and left everyone to starve, including the little slave girls, who later disappeared. It was a story I heard more than once, since I avidly prompted her to repeat it and she, indulging her own fondness for its melodrama, told it again with relish, describing her hatred for the Yankees (which remained undiminished in 1937), the real pain of her starvation (she said they were reduced to eating “roots and rats”), and her anguish when she was separated forever from those little black girls, who were called, incidentally, Drusilla and Lucinda, just as in so many antebellum plantation novels. All of the deliciously described particulars of my grandmother's chronicle held me spellbound, but I think that nothing so awed me as the fact that this frail and garrulous woman whom I beheld, and who was my own flesh and blood, had been the legal owner of two other human beings. It may have determined, more than anything else, some as-yet-to-be-born resolve to write about slavery.

Nat Turner entered my consciousness through brief references to his revolt in my text on Virginia history. But most memorably he appeared in the form of a historical highway marker adjoining a peanut field in Southampton County, where I traveled with our high school football team in the fall. This was a remote, down-and-out farm region, whose population was sixty percent black. I was transfixed by the information conveyed by that
marker, paraphrased thus: Nearby, in August of 1831, a fanatical slave named Nat Turner led a bloody insurrection that caused the death of fifty-five white people. Captured after two months in hiding, Nat was brought to trial in the county seat of Jerusalem (now Courtland) and he and seventeen of his followers were hanged. I recall how this sign set off in my mind extraordinary resonances, which were clearly in conflict with my grandmother's story: What was the connection, if any, between her loving memories and this cryptic notation of terror and mayhem? Perhaps more important, I remember wondering whether that bygone moment of sudden disaster didn't reflect something sinister in the divided white and black world in which I lived, so outwardly peaceable yet, except to the blind, troubled and jumpy with signs of resentment, sullenness, covert hostility, and anger. The Virginia of my boyhood, like virtually all the South, was a place where the amiable, if often edgy, relations between the races rose from an impulse that was mutually self-protective, keeping in abeyance much white fear and much black rage.

Daily life produced an unstated precariousness. There were strong, even passionate bonds of affection between individuals, black and white, but the social arrangement was a different matter; in the vast rural areas a form of pseudoslavery prevailed, and the white man's whim was law. Urban existence, not much better, gave rise to ghettos where crimes by blacks against blacks went ignored and unrecorded. At its worst, the South was filled with intimidation and brutality on a terrifying scale; in the Deep South lynchings were still more than occasional. At its best, kindheartedness and decency, along with genuine love spontaneously reciprocated, were the rule, but even so, the South suffered, in its Jim Crow shackles, from the sickness of alienation. It was a bizarre, culturally schizoid world with falsity at its core, not to speak of a glaring inhumanity. I'm sure that my early fascination with Nat Turner came from pondering the parallels between his time and my own society, whose genteel accommodations and endemic cruelties, large and small, were not really so different from the days of slavery. I think I must have wondered whether this tautly strained calmness might not someday be just as susceptible to violent retribution.

I wrote several works of fiction before I finally tackled
Nat Turner
. Then in the early 1960s I decided that the time was ripe; certainly I was never anything but intensely aware of the way in which the theme of slave rebellion was finding echoes in the gathering tensions of the civil rights movement.
Although it didn't dawn on me at the time, I later realized that one of the benefits for me in Nat Turner's story was not an abundance of historical material but, if anything, a scantiness. This was a drama that took place in a faraway backwater when information gathering was primitive. While it may be satisfying and advantageous for historians to feast on rich archival material, the writer of historical fiction is better off when past events have left him with short rations. A good example might be the abolitionist John Brown, who made his prodigious mark on history only thirty years after Nat Turner but whose every word and move were recorded by enterprising journalists, producing documents enough to fill a boxcar.

The novelist attempting John Brown's story is in conflict with the myriad known details of the chronicle, and his imagination cannot simply run off in a certain direction—which is what fiction writers need their imaginations to do—because he is fettered by already established circumstances. He is in danger of being overwhelmed by an avalanche of data. That is why the writing of novels about plentifully documented figures—Lincoln, say, or John F. Kennedy—is a risky matter, constricting for the writer himself who, while quite free to take liberties with the known facts (the shopworn but sound concept of artistic license), must still take care not to violate the larger historical record. (Although even here the convention has often been broken; history has taught us, for example, that Richard III was not an unmitigated villain, nor a hunchback, but only pedants carp at Shakespeare's nasty portrayal.)

The single meaningful document having to do with the Turner revolt was a short (seven-thousand-word) transcript that gave the title to my own work. The original
Confessions of Nat Turner
, which comprised both Nat's account of his upbringing and a description of the events leading up to the revolt, as well as the details of the revolt itself, was put in writing by a court-appointed lawyer named Thomas R. Gray, who took down the words from Nat's lips as he sat chained in his jail cell during the October days before his execution. From the first word this discourse poses serious questions of veracity. At a time when justice for slaves was at best a sham, and in the aftermath of a sensational trial where the state's absolute authority must have prevailed, how reliable or authentic was anything Nat said, when filtered through the mind of this minion of the state? Still, despite this problem, the bulk of the document appeared genuine—Nat himself had nothing to lose at this point by telling the truth, and while some of Gray's interpretation is
doubtless suspect, he had little to gain by substantially altering Nat's statement—and so I was generally disposed to use it as a guideline, a
loose
guideline, for my own narrative.